Intelligent Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS) will play an increasingly important role in modern motor vehicles of the future. Future vehicles will contain, for example, monitoring units such as camera systems having, for instance, digital CMOS (Complementary Metal-Oxide Semiconductor) or CCD (Charge-Coupled Device) image sensors as aids that monitor, record or image the outside environment, for example in the motor vehicle's direction of travel.
In connection with such image processing systems used in the automotive sector for detecting the driving environment, a pure black/white (B/W), that is to say monochrome, image recording is more advantageous than color image recording for most tasks. However, applications do exist where color information obtained from, for example, the three RGB primary colors red (R), green (G), and blue (B), and/or other colors such as, for instance, yellow (Y) etc., can be important for attaining a higher confidence level of the output vector generated by an image processing system.
An instance thereof is traffic sign recognition, wherein it is possible to recognize, by way of the where applicable, individual color information (R and/or G and/or B and/or other colors such as, for instance, Y etc.), whether the sign concerned is a prohibition sign or a sign giving orders, or one that purely provides information.
Another function is the recognition of colored lane markings, for example, in roadwork or construction areas. Color information is helpful here too, and is necessary to be able, for example, to distinguish between the normal white markings that are no longer valid and the additional yellow lane markings.
Conversely, purely monochrome (B/W) image recording is sufficient for a recognition of objects such as obstacles, other vehicles, bicyclists or other persons, because color information (R, G, B, Y etc.) will as a rule not provide better recognition quality in this context.